Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday October 18, 2013 @01:53PM
from the too-late,-already-panicked dept.

The Bad Astronomer writes "Last week, astronomers discovered 2013 TV135, a 400-meter wide asteroid that will swing by the Earth in 2032. The odds of an impact at that time are incredibly low — in fact, the chance it will glide safely past us is 99.99998%! But that hasn't stopped some venues from playing up the apocalypse angle. Bottom line: we do not have a good orbit for this rock yet, and as observations get better the chance of an impact will certainly drop. We can breathe easy over this particular asteroid."

It was modded off topic according to the history. Some mod was mad that we weren't taking "We probably aren't all going to die in 2032" seriously, or at least not directly discussing it.

I, for one, am glad that if I am smooshed by a big rock in 2032, odds are around 99.99998% that it will be a big terrestrial rock and not a space rock. Perhaps slightly lower given that there are other space rocks out there which could fall on me.

Yes his comment just undid his undoing of the aforementioned mod which is why I am commenting because I wont be undoing his non undoing of moderation. (sorry but this is more funny to me than the comment.)

Protip Tiger, we all saw 2012 and we all woke up December 26 2012 didn't we?

If by "we all" you limit yourself to "everyone who is alive to day and reading this particular story in/.", well, yes, you are absolutely correct. Everyone who woke up this morning also probably woke up on December 26, 2012. A very uninteresting statistic.

Now, a more useful reading of your words that isn't quite so self-referential and circular in reasoning would be that you're claiming that everyone in the world woke up that morning, which is patently false. There are 26 documented cases of people who d

not really, three percent of the earth land is covered by cities. but that is of 29% of earth covered by land. We'll thus probably go for hundreds of thousands of years before a city gets hit by "city-destroying" asteroid. boring.

While I'll admit it's a problem for everything within about a 200 mile radius, and has a potential to create a 50+ meter tsunami, depending on where it hits... globally speaking, it doesn't represent a significant threat.

But we know the Cascade Subduction Zone does rip over the entire chain, and it's done this quite a few times in recorded history, based on temple records in Japan and other areas of Tsunamis and local tree subsidence (ghost forests) and grey zones in the tidal aspects from the deposits.

As I said, you can't do anything about it, but it will happen and we're in the middle of the highest probability zone right now.

Wasn't clear, sorry. I was mostly referring to the sometime in this decade portion of the post as being unlikely.

An event as large as you describe, stretching from BC to CA, doesn't appear in the record anywhere. Tsunamis, ghost forests and the like are the effects of local events that, while they may be devastating to the area affected, are not region-wide disruptions. In fact to my knowledge an earthquake on that scale is pretty much unknown anywhere on the planet, ever. Rainer's last eruption 10,00

That is lower odds of success. This is about very low odds of failure. Tell any banker that the odds of losing in an investment are so low and probably will lend all the money of the world to bet all on it (probably 1 in 10 would be enough to invest millons, and this is several orders better).

There is still a chance that a viral zombie outbreak will happen before we are hit by an asteroid? Because a population ending asteroid would ruin the fun of it. Now if a population ending asteroid wanted to hit say after humanity overcame the zombie apocalypse, then I'm okay with that. Unless there is a space alien invasion. Then we need a zombie outbreak to be in full swing just as the space aliens invade. Then an asteroid can hit killing everything. However, if there is a chance for machines to become self-aware and bent on killing all organic life, then we need to hold off on the asteroid. So first we have the zombie outbreak, then the space aliens invade, and finally the rise of the Terminators comes about. Then after the dust settles, an asteroid can hit.

Not really. Local flora and fauna would kill off a zombie epidemic fairly quickly, if live humans weren't around. Just insects alone would have a field day, and in 72 hours would grow fast enough to deal with it.

Now, if I were talking with a whale, you might have an argument, but I kind of doubt that.

"Projection" is a psychological term that means you are assuming someone else has the same feelings and beliefs that you do. For example, you are mad at someone for some reason and based on that you assume they are mad at you.

In this case, you feel the Earth doesn't need you and you project that into a statement that it doesn't need "us". The Earth may very well not need you, I can't speak to that issue. If that is true, you are welcome to leave; the rest of us who want to stay will wave goodbye as you ex

It's all a scam. They're hiding the possible cure for asteroid impacts, because this way they can continue to get unlimited grant money from the government. They've already planned their off-planet habitat for when the earth is destroyed, but they won't admit to its existence because then the sheeple would question the purpose of those radio telescopes and interplanetary probes.

If the odds were higher, then governments might start taking money off their war spending and start putting some serious money into space technology and asteroid deflection programs, which would certainly lead to a faster space colonization, asteroid mining and so on,

Folks-
Please note a couple of math errors in the article (and in the headline I submitted here at/.).
1) The chance of it missing is 99.998%, and not 99.99998%. I misplaced a parenthesis when I did the math and wound up essentially getting 100 - 1/63000 instead of 1 - 1/63000. D'oh.
2) Also, the original circle I drew in the article was too big. This one makes me smile wryly: I first drew up the analogy as the circular cross-sectional area of a target region in space versus the cross-section of the Earth. Both are circles. However, a pixel is square! So my circle was too wide by a factor of the square root of pi, since the radius of the circle is the sqrt(area/pi). Put in 63,000 pixels for the area and the radius is 141.
I corrected the article, sent a note to TPTB at Slashdot, and beg the forgiveness of math pedants everywhere.:)

The chances of it happening went up a thousandth of a percent in the half an hour since the summary was posted? If these trends continue, the asteroid will have a 157.68% chance of hitting us!

(9 years x 365 days x 24 hours x 2 half hour x 0.001 chance, if anyone's curious about what I typed into my calculator. There are bigger problems with the above statement anyway. To any cable news journalists reading, this is a joke.)

The odds of an impact at that time are incredibly low — in fact, the chance it will glide safely past us is 99.99998%! But that hasn't stopped some venues from playing up the apocalypse angle.

A 1 in 5,000,000 chance of this asteroid hitting is super high compared to the 1 in 175,223,510 [powerball.com] odds of winning the grand prize in the Powerball lottery, yet tons of idiots still line up to play.

There are multiple lotteries drawing every week; but there is only one asteroid lottery. More importantly, people witness numerous life-changing lottery payouts every month. Nobody in historical times has ever witnessed a civilization altering asteroid event.

So. Simply looking at the odds isn't enough. The experimental results are that voluntary participation in the lottery produces a handful of millionaires every month, while mandatory participation in the asteroid lottery produces a few rumored deaths

If it would certainly drop, then it would be already zero today. The reason why the estimate is currently 0.00002% is because it is not known at which side the real value is. Actually, a defining criteria of a proper estimate is that it is located in the middle of the probability distribution, meaning that the actual value might lie on either side, with equal probability.

I think what he means is that they have already made up their minds that it will miss us, so as their calculations get better the probability that it will miss is going to go up from.9 to 1.0.

But, right now we have calculated that there is a.9-whatever chance that it is going to miss us, and their is a.0-whatever that it is going to hit us. In the real world it has already been decided, but we are unsure what which course is already set in stone.

With only 19 or so years to go, we'll have to act quickly to get a long range space craft up to this asteroid if we want to alter its trajectory so it certainly will hit Earth! There's no time to waste if we're going to set up for this future crisis!

If the angle is just right, it skip off the atmosphere like a stone skipping on the surface of a pond. Too low, and the atmosphere would slow it down and it would break up into lots of little pieces and burn up..

I'm sorry. Astronomers didn't detect Eris until 2005. Eris is a dwarf planet that's more massive than Pluto (that's why Pluto's not a planet anymore, we'd have to admit there was another planet closer and bigger than Pluto, and that we're basically blind. Now, when we factor in that these city or country or world killing asteroids can be smaller than dwarf planets... Yeah, sorry bub. You've got no legs to stand on when you make predictions. The evidence doesn't bear out. This particular asteroid prob

I think I finally understand why you post with such a superiority complex and arrogant attitude - you're an alien. I mean you must be - you can't be human because you refer to use as "you humans", as if you're separate from the species.

Either that or you're a fucking disgrace of a person who thinks they're better than everyone else. To be honest though, most elitist Linux users have similar views.

However, remember we only observe a small fraction of the skies, and much of the things that have a 99.99998% chance of missing us, were never detected.

Also.... when asteroids get close enough to our orbit to have a 0.9999998 chance of impacting us;
eventually, the number of times this is happening adds up to a million, and the number of expected collissions is 1 or greater.

If someone has the resources to shift the orbit of an asteroid sufficiently to cause an impact, there are tons of other things they could be spending those resources on that would be much more destructive, and much more immediate.

If someone has the resources to shift the orbit of an asteroid sufficiently to cause an impact, there are tons of other things they could be spending those resources on that would be much more destructive, and much more immediate.

First, your B-25 example was an accident. While the pilots where not where they should have been at that altitude, they certainly didn't intend to hit the building. 9/11 was decidedly done on purpose.

Second, in the US, there are flight restrictions about flying over populated areas (buildings and such) but the restriction is about how high above such areas you have to stay. Generally, there are no flight restrictions over urban areas or cities as long as you stay high enough. Large cities do tend to h

Large cities do tend to have large airports and large airports tend to have restricted airspace around them,

If they did, nobody could land at them.

You mean they have controlled airspace around them, under the control of various ATCs. The levels of control range from class B (most requirements for use) through class E (not much). G is uncontrolled. These have been around for a long time, unconnected with 9/11.

Why did they start at B instead of A? Class A airspace covers the entire US at and above flight level 180 ("18,000 feet as indicated by a sensitive altimeter set to a standard air pressure of 29.27 inches

Just stay above 3,000 AGL and you are golden.. Assuming you are not into Controlled Airspace, I would consider buzzing around under 3,000 to be somewhat dangerous over urban areas anyway unless it is a really short trip. That extra altitude could save your life should a problem develop. Like my flight instructor was fond of saying.. "Nothing is more useless than the runway behind you, the gas you left in the truck, or the altitude above you." So you always land on the longest runway the wind allows, carry

If you've got an airport nearby that can be difficult. Or less safe at a minimum. Above 3000 AGL and then dive into the pattern at 1000 AGL? Look out below! Or you're making a cross-country flight and you don't know the stadium is there.

Assuming you are not into Controlled Airspace, I would consider buzzing around under 3,000 to be somewhat dangerous over urban areas anyway unless it is a really short trip.

Flying at 2000 AGL is not "buzzing" in anyone's dictionary, except those who 1) aren't pilots or 2) are the kind of person who buys a house next to an airport and then complains about all the noise from those nasty airplane things. You mention your "flight instructor", and

And then comes the day when you have your first real emergency and the only airport you can reach has a 1500' runway. You've never practiced on anything shorter than the 10,000' runway at your home airport. Wrong time to learn short field landings, I'd say.

I routinely practice short field landing techniques using long runways. I can usually get the C-150 stopped in less than 300' ground roll and usually get wheels on the ground with 10' of the threshold. I use a 4,000 foot runway for practice this all the time. I practice short field departures from the same runway. So when I did happen to fly into the 2,000 ft field, I knew what to do. There's no need to go hit the 1500 ft runway and crash a few times learning how.

Do you have any idea of what would be involved? What do you think, that the bad guys (or the good ones, at that) have Star Trek-level technology? Methinks that you would do well to learn some physics and engineering.

Actually, no. If you think of all the future paths plotted as a probabilistic cone, Earth occupies a very small portion of the end of the cone. More data will narrow the cone, almost certainly moving it off an Earth-intercept. Almost.